Social Science Research Council

The Eurasia Program, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) successfully held its first Training Seminar for Policy Research (TSPR) on June 6-9, 2006. The seminar was open, through a nation-wide competition, to advanced graduate students and junior faculty in the social sciences, humanities and other relevant disciplines in which scholars engage with health-related topics with respect to Eurasia.

Throughout the course of the four-day event, each of the eight selected participants was tasked with reexamining their own research from the perspectives of both interdisciplinarity and policy relevance. Research topics of selected participants included work on anti-tobacco campaigns in twentieth century Russia; harm-reduction strategies and Russian addiction medicine; intimate partner violence, risky behavior and STI risk among Ukrainian women; tuberculosis control in post-socialist Georgia; and decentralization and failed health care reforms in Russia.

Participants discussed their individual research projects with one another, and they further benefited from comments by three senior resource persons (Judyth Twigg, Virginia Commonwealth University; Kate Schecter, American International Health Alliance; and Daniel Alexandrov, European University of St. Petersburg). Seminar participants were further joined by guest speakers from a cross-section of academia, nonprofit, government and international organizations. Individual participants benefited not only from critical discussions of their own research in an interdisciplinary setting, but they also gained valuable skills and vocabularies to allow them to better tailor their work to a broader audience of academics, practitioners and policymakers. Seminar activities were held jointly at the SSRC offices in New York City and at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

New York sessions provided individual participants with focused critiques of their research papers and an initial discussion of potential policy implications of the presented works. Taking advantage of the SSRC's proximity to the United Nations building, participants also benefited from direct interaction in a special panel in which U.N. representatives discussed the various objectives and policies of their respective agencies as related to issues of HIV/AIDS and other health related topics.

Washington, D.C. sessions were hosted at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and were devoted to research methodologies and professional trajectories and opportunities for scholars working on health-related topics. While in D.C., the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosted a panel discussion, "HIV/AIDS in Eurasia: Context, Policy, Research." This panel was moderated by Blair Ruble, Director of the Kennan Institute, and was comprised of the following speakers: Senator Bob Bennett (Utah), Craig Calhoun (SSRC), Jennifer Cooke (Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Robert Heimer, MD (Yale University). The four-day seminar concluded with PowerPoint presentations of mock policy briefs that each participant created for the seminar on the basis of their existing scholarly research and expertise.

Funded by the U.S. Department of State (Title VIII), this training seminar for policy research is one of a number of activities, including annual pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, institutional language grants, dissertation development workshops, and other events, through which the SSRC Eurasia Program helps to bolster research and training on the New States of Eurasia. In addition to encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to training and scholarship on Eurasia, TSPR further challenges scholars to engage with diverse and important communities beyond the confines of academia. In this endeavor, the SSRC's initial focus on issues of public health proved highly amenable and greatly rewarding.